Category: Television

I'll confess that I don't watch much television news, but I have run across Greta Van Susteren through the years, principally when she served as an analyst during the O.J. Simpson trial. Since then, it would appear Ms. Van Susteren has parlayed her expertise into a nightly primetime show on the Fox News Channel.

Where she pontificates on matters outside her expertise.

For instance, Ms. Van Susteren, who may be highly qualified to discuss the criminal law, also feels qualified to discuss computer surveillance, security, and international intelligence. But on these matters she has no more business giving opinions than do I. Less, in fact. I know this, because I am one of her sources of news.

Screenshots follow, to punish the guilty.

Now, it may well be that Ms. Van Susteren has been to North Korea three times, and she may well read a bit about the country, but if she is obtaining her news from "the North Korea state-owned news twitter feed," she is obtaining it from a dubious source indeed. The feed's actual author, me1, has never been to the Korean peninsula at all, and cannot read a word of the language. "The North Korean state run media" is a parody, derived in tone more from Soviet Russian newspapers (which I could read) than from Korean propaganda.

How could this have happened? Probably confirmation bias: the Tweet was too good to check. If Ms. Van Susteren had scrolled further down the feed, she'd have found such gems of news as:

We're told, by the media, that we should trust their authority, that they have "layers of editors and fact-checkers" at their service. But sometimes they're no better than bloggers, particularly when they venture outside their areas of expertise, or they fail to consult actual experts.

This is not a slam against Ms. Van Susteren or Fox News in particular. The "North Korea state-owned news twitter feed" has taken in many journalists through the years, at publications and websites more and less prestigious, on the right and left sides of the ideological center. It is to say, rather, that we as consumers of what the news media purvey, should be careful about what we're buying.

Trust but verify. Caveat emptor.

UPDATE:

Despite multiple comments at her own site warning Ms. Van Susteren, THIS IS A PARODY, meaning, "Go back and look," Ms. Van Susteren (who has updated her post) merely concedes that "some say" the "North Korea state-owned news twitter feed" is a parody. I myself, and others, have tweeted her multiple times to tell her: "Yes it is."

It is a sweet puppy. Again, this isn't ideological criticism of Ms. Van Susteren, or of Fox, but an example of confirmation bias. When I want to get ideological, I do it with Juche. SECOND UPDATE: If Ms. Van Susteren replies or addresses this, we will update.

Remember when I said this gentle bit of media criticism was non-ideological?

Slate, hardly a bastion of right-wing thought, has just fallen for the same bait (here's a cache). According to Slate, North Korea is enjoying a massive breakthrough in internet technology.

Again, a screenshot to punish the guilty:

To its credit, Slate has left the story (mostly) intact, and published a correction. A most grudging correction, which hardly acknowledges that author Lily Hay Newman was hacked by … her own gullibility, and again, confirmation bias.

It isn't a "misstatement," Ms. Newman. It's a failure to read. Again, if you'd only scrolled down the feed a bit, you'd have discovered this recap of the 2014 World Cup:

All-conquering victorious heroes of Korean People's Football Team defeat Japan, USA, advancing to World Cup final against Germany.

I stood my ground, there on the lecture platform at the World Science Fiction Convention, and I repeated the heretical words that had sent them into animal hysterics: "Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurist drivel; Star Trek can turn your brains into puree of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I'll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunch to back it up!"

Harlan Ellison

Fifty years ago a member of a minor race of gods, like Prometheus, fled from his technological Olympus to bring a gift to man: the gift of intelligent science fiction television programming. It's a gift that has lasted and grown, in one form or another, to the present. Before Doctor Who, televised science fiction consisted of Rod Serling anthologies and the like, some of which were pretty good but all of which were hampered by the enforced convention of the plot twist ("Sorry Burgess, it's not enough to make an entertaining story of a bookworm freed from all his cares when he oversleeps through an atomic war – his glasses have to break at the end of the show), and …

Space westerns.

In the vibrant post-Doctor Who world of television, we have variety: the Serling anthologies have largely vanished, but at least in America we've had plenty of space westerns! Lost in Space, Star Trek, Space: 1999, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica in both its incarnations. And the X-Files, which is not a space western.

Moreover the Doctor has what some people may refer to as "BALL".

Doctor Who is most assuredly not a space western. Doctor Who, through the years, can be and has been anything you want it to be. It's alternate history. It's a detective show. It's horror. It's political drama. And sometimes, it's a space western. The show's premise is straightforward. An alien scientist, from an astonishingly advanced and decadent civilization known as the Time Lords, steals a time machine and flees to the backwater planet of Earth, which he fancies for about the same reasons Gandalf admired the Shire. From the Earth, with one or more (usually) human (often) lady (always) platonic companions, he flies around space and time, having adventures!

But oh what adventures. Through its fifty years (minus an almost 20 year hiatus enforced by BBC bigwigs who thought the show childish), the show has ranged from historical melodrama to gothic horror to Douglas Adams comedy to straight space opera. With a variety of actors playing the central character, from William Hartnell's cranky old victorian gentleman to Tom Baker's loveable scarfed oddball to Christopher Eccleston's tough guy in black to Matt Smith's wise young action hero. You see, through the amazing alien technology known as plot contrivance, whenever the Doctor suffers mortal injury (or whenever an actor tires of the role), he can regenerate into a new form and body, with the same memories but a different personality.

In fifty years the show has built up a supporting cast of recurring friends and villains that would fill an encyclopedia volume, some of whom are as interesting as the central character, including what must be television's second greatest recurring villain (after J. R. Ewing):

In honor of the show's fiftieth anniversary a special broadcast episode, the Day of the Doctor, will run on television and in theaters all over the world today and Monday, with a special guest appearance by Queen Elizabeth I. If you've never watched Doctor Who, what better time to start?

In case you were wondering, that poster on the wall in the background at the end of this season's premier when Levitt was talking to Houston was an 1899 production by Strobridge Lithographic featuring the minor magician Zan Zig:

I have resisted what amounts to a dare by Patrick to geek out in front you all over the progress of the HBO series Game of Thrones, which has had two episodes now. Suffice it to say: I am rereading the series (in my iPad this time) in preparation for the 5th book in July, I am faithfully watching and enjoying the series, I am attempting to keep my dear wife (Happy Anniversary, dear) interested in it, and I am using it to think about the necessary differences between art forms. But I am reserving the more effusive geekery to other locales, so as not to embarrass Patrick. It's really the least I can do.

That said: one of the great things about this series of tubes is its ability to deliver to us not only pure geekery in its unrefined form, but geek fusion, in which different types of geekery are combined in new and exciting ways. In that spirit, via the man himself, I give you The Inn at the Crossroads, a blog that documents attempts to re-create both medieval and modern versions of the foods described in GRRM's Song of Ice and Fire series.

There were many ways this old man could have handled his grandson's query about prejudice, a word his grandson was too young to understand. Or even to pronounce.

He could have explained, without being judgmental, why it's best to think of our friends as individuals rather than classifying them as part of an arbitrary group.

He could have given his grandson a short, sanitized history of anti-semitism, explaining why Jimmy legitimately felt ostracized by being classed as "The Other," while, in his grandfatherly fashion, getting his grandson to agree that, as good people, the grandfather and the grandson are above this sort of name-calling and labeling. He could have started his grandson down the right path, to a future in which the boy judged individuals on their merits, rather than by race, religion, or class. He could have made the boy part of the team.

But did the grandfather do that? No.

Grandpa lowered the boom. He told his four year old grandson, so young that he still lisped, that the boy was an incurable bigot. Beyond redemption. A thought criminal with no hope of reform.

There is a reason the camera fades away in the last seconds of this public service commercial: so as to avoid showing this boy's face as his own grandfather deals a traumatic blow, an emotional punch in the stomach, that will follow the boy to his shame for the rest of his days. There is no way the child will ever think of himself as a decent person after this. Every time this child looks in the mirror, he will hate the face that looks back at him. Whenever he sees his friend Jimmy, he'll be filled with self-loathing.

Kinder that the grandfather had removed one of those hooks from his hat and gouged out the boy's eye.

Today that kid is probably a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, bouncing between parole and prison in a meth-fueled haze, praying to Wotan, in his lucid moments, that the government never connects him to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Thanks a lot, grandpa. And thanks a lot, Jimmy Carter, for traumatizing kids with this sort of shit during their After School Specials.

Until then, I'll miss Elisabeth Sladen, who passed away after a long fight with cancer this morning.

Fans of Doctor Who know Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, who accompanied the Doctor in the series' first golden age, while Tom Baker was playing the character in the early and mid-1970s. The character, and the actress who played her, was so appealing that alone among the cast in the series' "first" 25 year run, Sladen was brought back in the series' modern, second run. Where she was just as enjoyable, so beloved that she was brought back for her own, children's oriented series, in which she still starred.

HBO's adaptation of George R. R. Martin's Game Of Thrones premiers Sunday. Set your clocks, and your hearts, for this once in a lifetime event Popehat readers.

Unlike Ken (who I know is counting the seconds until Sunday night), I enjoy Atlas Shrugged as much as I enjoy A Game Of Thrones, which is to say, I enjoy it mildly. Rand's followers compare her work favorably to that of Plato and Dostoevsky. Martin's followers call his work C. S. Lewis for adults, or Tolkien meets the Wars of the Roses (and therefore, implicitly, Shakespeare). To call any of these comparisons a stretch is to be kind. At least Rand knew how her book would end (with a 78 page speech) before she wrote it.

Martin is just stringing his audience along. When he dies, his fans will compare A Game of Thrones to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony.

But as long as we understand that going in (we surely do four books in), that's entertainment!

Now where is my twelve hour adaptation of Cryptonomicon? That would be art.

I thought, at first, that Cracked was having us on — that it was describing a fictional, over-the-top show in order to satirize reality TV.

Oh Lord, how I wish that were true. Because the show is real — and, if anything, worse than Cracked's heroic but futile attempts to ridicule it would suggest. E! thinks people want to watch this sort of shit. And they're right.

Friends on the west coast who haven't had a chance to see the premiere of AMC's The Walking Dead tonight, should.

I didn't expect to like it. I expected to see the first episode, satisfy myself that it wasn't worth watching, and move on. Though I'm a fan of George Romero, I don't like most zombie movies, because most zombie movies are, to put it plainly, awful.

But here we have a true contender. I highly recommend The Walking Dead to fans of George Romero or Max Brooks, but also to anyone (with a strong stomach) who enjoys a good suspense or horror yarn of any sort. On the evidence of one show, this will be a top notch television program.

The head of the University of California at San Diego's robotics laboratory, tasked with creating a lifelike, human seeming robot, is named Javier Movellan.

The British science fiction television show Doctor Who, in the 1970s, featured a race of aliens named Movellans. The Movellans were engaged in a galaxy-spanning war against the better known Daleks.

Daleks

Here's where it gets weird. The Daleks were a race of living creatures, cyborgs, who required robotic shells to stay alive. Opponents of the Daleks often mistook them for robots. Horrific, genocidal robots, but robots nonetheless.

Movellans

The Movellans, on the other hand, looked and behaved like humans, so much so that they were mistaken for living creatures. But in fact they were robots, less like humans than the Daleks they fought.

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"If you come to Popehat because you think that it is a law blog, you are sorely mistaken. Popehat is a geek blog, and it's a matter of mere happenstance that most of the bloggers here are law geeks. Some, such as Ken and Patrick and Charles, have carried their preoccupation to absurd extremes...." ~ David (previous)